The present application relates to a communication apparatus, a communication system, a notification method, and a program product.
In recent years, wireless communication functions are mounted on many electronic devices, and correspondingly, various wireless communication standards have been established. Typical examples of personal wireless technologies, for example, include a wireless LAN and the Bluetooth (trademark) (hereinafter, referred as BT). These wireless technologies are used for multifunctional home appliances such as a personal computer (hereinafter, referred as PC), a mobile phone, and a personal digital assistance (hereinafter, referred as PDA), small built-in devices such as a digital camera, and a printer, and the like. Hereinafter, a device equipped with such wireless communication function is referred as a wireless device.
These wireless devices have been in widespread use and have been used in many scenes, and accordingly, user's convenience is improved. On the other hand, unauthorized invasion to wireless devices and security damages such as outflow of personal information have become problematic, and therefore, security enhancement in the wireless devices has been strongly desired.
Under such background, many systems for security enhancement have been provided, and at the same time, it has become a large burden for general users who lack expertise to set proper security settings for each device. Consequently, as one method which is for achieving security setting of wireless devices by a simple operation, there is proposed a working referred as handover in which setting information and the like necessary for authentication is automatically exchanged between devices using a communication method having a narrow communication range, and then, the communication method is switched to a communication method having a wider communication range.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-364145 discloses a configuration of handover in which protocol information and the like that can be used by another communication apparatus is exchanged using a first communication means and the communication means is switched to a second communication means using the exchanged protocol information and the like. In addition, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-14076 discloses a communication system which improves security by performing handover after a session key produced with a random number is encrypted and exchanged. In addition, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-74598 discloses a method which exchanges protocol information among not less than three devices which support different communication methods and realizes communications by switching a communication method to an optimum one.